Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

don’t remember that.
    There’s a limit to what you can be surprised by, I guess. And hadn’t I already seen first Daniel’s face, then P.J.’s, then Jackson’s after we’d found out about their dead—bruised, eyes swollen like pastries, lips split, empurpled? I remember it making sense, in a way, when I saw them like that; it was how I imagined it must feel privately, just externalized. But I didn’t think about it, not really, and when I saw them in the shack, tying Gary Powers awkwardly to the pipe, it was no revelation. I’m sure I was surprised. I’m sure the whole thing was vaguely terrifying to me. I was fifteen years old, after all, and not one of them, not really. But I stood there in silence and pointed the handheld video camera where they wanted, and there has to be a reason why I did not leave.
    I was more startled by the violence of the movement on the videotape, on my little TV screen, watching it that day after Hilton passed than I was standing there at the time, watching them beat Gary over the top of the little pop-out viewfinder. In person, it felt like one person hitting him (the hood now off his head) at a time, which is, in fact, how it was, each one of the boys taking turns with their fists, but on the tape it looks more like a close mob, a gang, a group beating, unfair. The tape, unlike my memory, has not been granted the small mercy of silence, either, and when I watched it alone in my living room, years later on that rainy afternoon, I winced at the solid, wet impact of the awkward punches, at Gary’s whimpering, more panicked than I remember it being.
    One thing that’s not on the tape, but that I do remember clearly, is watching Gary three days later during Bible class. Samuel told me much later about how it was his duty to take Gary to the camp nurse afterward, because he was good at stories. But what I remember, sitting there that morning in Bible study, is Gary Powers’ face, the bruises already turning their muted, sickly colors, half of his upper lip so swollen that it almost succeeded in obscuring his goofy smile at the boys who had abducted him.
    â€¢
    The 27th season of the Four State Christian Summer Baseball League started off for us about how you would expect. The only thing the members of the One True Congregation of the Savior and Nazarene who ran the Hope and Grace Bible Camp actually paid for were our hats, which were maroon with a gold cross above the bill. We did have uniforms (embroidered by the generous Sisters during a marathon Army Wives meeting in the Temple Mount). They onlyhad two words on them, both on the front: HOPE on the right side of the buttons and GRACE on the left, and each set of letters was situated too high up, almost in line with the collarbone. The effect was to make the words seem like labels for our arms (a detail not missed by our opponents’ bench, who guffawed every time Hilton’s GRACE rocketed the ball to center field while trying to catch a runner stealing second, or Truman’s HOPE sent a batter in the on-deck circle sprawling to the dirt). Four games in, all of which we lost, the league donated some batting helmets so we could stop borrowing the other team’s, and the day before the best prospect for our first win Brother Reeter brought a collection of his old Babe Ruth League bats from when he was a kid, which cheered us all up, even though they were the old fashioned kind (“Wood was good enough to see to Christ’s demise, it’ll work fine for yours,” he grouched). It was also around that time that the other teams started calling us the Martyrs.
    I can still see our starting lineup. Everyone’s positions seemed almost preordained, fated in a way. Gary Powers, for instance, whom everyone called You Too after the day Sister Brooks told us about his namesake in history class, was small and wiry and played a rangy shortstop. Hilton Hedis, of course, played